Then why isn’t Glenn Beck in jail for his alleged* actions in 1990?
*(not that the qualification matters, since you are dismissing the specifics of the given fact situation as irrelevant)
Back to page one, LT is 50+ and old enough to find those signals. NO question. He’s an idiot.
But at a college bar, if a guy is 21 or 22, meets a girl, she turns out to be using her sister’s ID, the resemblance is striking, she turns out to be 15 yadda yadda, yes it’s statutory rape. Should there be jail time? Should there be a temporary sex offender listing?
It really is hard to blanket this situation. With ages so close to each other, I wouldn’t think jail time is necessary. Now, if the guy were 30+ we got a different ball game.
Maybe we should draw the line not just at the victim’s age but also at the perpetrator’s?
I think it’s much easier for a 21 year old to be conned by an underage girl than someone over 30.
(my bold)
This is not even worthy of a serious response, so I’ll just say
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HA
I’m an atheist, and I did fine when I was single.
For me it’s behavioral as much as physical, and what I said was there was a difference between a 21 year old and 15 year old, not a 21 year old.
Though it is, apparently, the day of a change in physical appearance such that the person’s appearance before could not possibly be mistaken for the person’s appearance afterwards, any more than the face of the Tenth Doctor could be mistaken for that of the Eleventh. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
There may be something to this. 21 year old guys are pretty stupid. Even twentysomethings look much younger to me now – more “kid” like – in my 40’s than they did when I was in my 20’s.
Teenagers are evn more obvious to me, especially from the way they talk and act.
This reminded me of the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where he is acid tripping and imagining the judge chopping off his balls with a big axe. 
I’ve never been a “smooth operator” and now I’m 39. Teens are easy to spot. Back when I was 21, co-workers were about the same age, bosses just a few years older. All of us would say things like “Word”, or “Thumbs up to that”. :rolleyes: I was amazed to find out one supervisor was 12 years older than me. Didn’t look it back then. Also that two were still in high school. I thought they were older than me!
Now I would see the same supervisor and think, “Damn, that goatee is so thin he must be 19!” At 21 years, facial hair meant “older”.
Plus, getting laid at 21 was much more of a priority than now. Hormones abound. Would I even want to look for signals that this hottie I just bought a beer for might be underage?? Even if she was 16, meh. Only 5 years difference is what I would’ve thought.
Now, I don’t want anything to do with women UNDER the age of, say, 28. This is due to the conversation if we start a relationship. I don’t want stupid shit like “We HAVE to save Tibet!”
With all that said, if you’re 30 or 40 and you meet someone younger than you thought, you’re just like the 21 year old. Brain saying “sex sex sex sex”. Pervert.
You’ve dropped responsibilities for a quickie. But you’re old enough to know your responsibilities.
The larger the age difference between the two people, the larger the pervert factor, IMHO. a 17 and 15 year old engaged in sex is nothing close to a 44 and 15 year old engaged in sex.
Dio, I really do respect your fervor in protecting teenage girls from pedophiles and the like, but there is a distinction that I think you are missing. It is entirely possible for a girl to look older than she is and for her to have an ID that says otherwise. The law says that its illegal to have sex with underage girls, and its for a good reason. But there are times when a 21 year old guy could get wrapped up in a situation like that. I am 26 and I take care not to put my weiner where it shouldn’t be going, but when I was in college…
I am just lucky thats all. Not everything is black and white. You seem very emotionally charged about the situation, so it might be hard for you to understand…
I’ll bite.
I don’t believe that there should be any line at which the defense of honest mistake should not apply, but I would say that the younger they are, particularly if they are prepubescent :rolleyes:, the more unlikely it is that the defendant will be believed. (Especially if they had a conversation before sex).
Like it or not, there are some girls, particularly when they are done up, who can easily pass for over-18, and frequently do. Leaving aside the rather grotesquely puritanical future you envisage in which people are forbidden to have sex unless they are well-acquainted, it would be an unbelievable moment killer to require ID before sex - but even that isn’t enough for you.
If the girl looks over the legal age, says she is, and has ID to prove it, then sending someone to jail for having sex with her is barbaric. Doesn’t matter what age she is - if she is 14, and looks 18, the innocent man should not go to jail.
I concede the point that I am thinking from the perspective of a 44-year old (as well as a guy with three daughters). When I was 21 or 22, I was idiot too. What would seem like obvious warning signs to me now probably would have gone right by me then.
Okay, but what if the innocent man is 47 years old? If the man in question was 18, then I say no jail time.
Also, does the 14 year old deserve a penalty? Possession of fake ID is illegal.
Pervert.
…
I really was going to say “damn Dio you sound like a dad of a teen daughter that has been involved with something like this” but I didn’t want to make assumptions. I can totally understand why you would feel the way you do if you had a daughter that it could happen to. I just have a problem with laws that have no concept of gray… like situations where yes, a law could have been broken but it wasn’t intentional.
I don’t advocate sleeping with underage girls at all but I can see how it could happen. Sex offender laws in general need to be thought out again for reasons such as this. It would be a hell of a note to have a sex offender sign in your yard for 20 years because some hussy lied to you at a bar.
This is a pretty hilarious position to take since “she” actually IS a lying (with her fake id) slut (obviously sex-positive) by the terms of the hypothetical.
This’d be a more profitable discussion if you didn’t sound like you were perpetually knee-jerking from this part of your brain. I mean, look, I would happily beat the pudding out of anyone who hurts or abuses my kid sister(-in-law), and I’m sure I’ll feel the same way about my eventual daughters, and I understand you there–but that’s not a sensible perspective from which to debate policy.
Thanks Diogenes for you, folks. It’s all part of his debating style. That is, it involves never graciously admitting error or shades of gray. It also requires adamantly insisting on being right, no matter how contrary evidence is provided and no matter how many times one contradicts one’s self.
:dubious: That’s the only way to be sure? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? Some samples of women I’ve had some kind of relations with who were under 35: One, I’d known since junior high school. Another was a college undergraduate student, who’d gone to high school with classmates of ours, and whose parents I had met after we started dating but before we slept together. Another was the mother of an eight-year-old boy–I never saw her birth certificate, but I’m pretty damned sure she was at least twenty-three or so, based on typical puberty ages and a little math. Hell, running through everybody I can think of, the iffiest hookup I ever had was with the lovely lady I ended up wedded to, as (a) I’d only known her a few weeks and (b) she looked maybe sixteen, tops. But we had a lot of mutual friends, including her ex-fiance, who she’d lived with for a couple years after getting her associates’ degree–hard to imagine her being less than twenty (she was actually twenty-four). It’s real easy to figure these things out–not from appearances (based on appearances, I’d have run like hell, and then where would I be? Not celebrating my twentieth wedding anniversary next month, I’ll tell you that!), but by actually getting to know someone before you stick your penis in. Is that really that hard? (No pun intended.)
And all that said, it really doesn’t matter. It’s quite possible I might have done something foolish in my younger days. And maybe that’s a good argument for changing the ages of consent, and adding more generous Romeo & Juliet exemptions permitting larger age differences between parties near but on opposite sides of the age of consent. (That first girl I mentioned in my list may have dodged a bullet–she turned 18 several months before I did, during our relationship. I don’t know exactly what the law said about that in that time and place …) But it seems like the complaint in this thread is about the offense being a strict liability. There are many things I’d like to change about the statutory rape and prostitution laws, but that is not one of them. There are genuine consequences to not drawing a line and living with it. If ignorance is an excuse, then there’s tremendous pressure to remain ignorant to stay safe. As it is, the pressure is to become less ignorant to stay safe–to learn about the person you’re hoping to be with as a person, and not leap straight from ‘she looks sexy’ to ‘hump like nymphomaniac rabbits’. I like that, and I think we should leave it that way. And frankly, I’d rather lower the age of consent to twelve and leave it as strict liability, than put it at eighteen or whatever it is in your jurisdiction but add a ‘doesn’t apply to idiots’ clause.
I’m waaaaaay more puritannical than you and still can see what you can’t.
a) Let Age of Consent be the rule.
b) Allow for some sort of “Romeo & Juliet” rules so that you don’t end up raping your girlfriend who’s two months younger than you simply because you’ve just turned over AoC.
c) Allow for some reduction or nullifying of penalties if extremely extenuating circumstances can be proven (like our “impossible” scenarios). Particularly regarding registring as a sex offender.
In this case you’re guilty unless you can prove it and the full gargantuan-sized onus is on you.
By waaaaay more puritannical I mean no sex until after married.